Marketing tools are damaging your SEO. And how to fix it.

Oh wow, thanks for the mention Harry.

I think performance is too low on the priority list when it comes to SEO. You can see great results with little effort. Here's a few more tips.

Low effort, high reward:

• Use the loading="lazy" attribute on images and videos where possible.
• Minify your static assets: JS, CSS, SVG, HTML. Seems obvious but often overlooked.
• Use a HTTP/2 CDN. Most CDNs support HTTP/2 by default now. Netlify is great (be aware that they are blocked in Russia right now though).

Medium effort, medium reward:

• Use srcset to always deliver the correct image size. Don't just deliver the high-resolution version.
• You can use Lighthouse as a bot that audits pull requests automatically for you.
• WebP has 80% support now and is usually ~30% lighter than PNG/JPEG. Use it and fallback to PNG/JPEG on unsupported browsers.

This is a great trick. :)

On the subject of performance, I think a lot of web developers get complacent because they are testing their sites over a fast connection. That hides a lot of issues.

Try surfing the web on a bad 4G or 3G connection and you’ll quickly become painfully aware of how big the download size is for many of today’s websites. (Lots of data available at HTTP Archive if anyone is curious about trends: https://httparchive.org/ )

Maybe ask yourself if you really need to add that extra script, or that huge image. :) It’s not free.

That is an excellent implementation. We saw really poor performance from installing Drift (multiple seconds load time, Google flagged a dependency as malware so de-indexed a site) as well as HotJar or other analytics plugins. Nuking these dropped our load time to under a second.